Ten Years After

Looking back ten years we see the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock, RBS and so on, and the exposure of the crooked means to artificial wealth that wasn't really supposed to happen. The banks were bailed out because otherwise the whole system would crumble (which means, technically, it still could).
We tend to move on from day to day without realising the cause and effect that follows through after such events; we're stupid, we hope for the best, we're a 'virus in shoes'. We forget, and we get clogged in the present.
Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and George Bush the President back then, and we might smile. But there followed ten years of 'depression'. Personally, we have suffered this less than millions of others. But not now.
Who would have put on a bet we would now have Theresa May as Prime Minister and Donald Trump as President? That we would have voted to leave the EU? That we would have experienced the disastrous consequences of yet more wars we do not understand, that we would have the concept of 'fake news' almost legitimated? Or that we would have machines predict our speech patterns in communication, or social media platforms that predict and influence our choices to the point of determining them? Are these things related? There appears chaos but there is underlying, rampaging, order. The Loch Ness monster might pop up in front of our balcony, or a Church of Ra erupt opposite the Cash Converters, but I guarantee there will be more, and more obvious, heroin addicts lining up for their just-in-time delivery tomorrow just across the street: that business might as well become a legitimate franchise.
I owe (much of) the content above to John Lanchester, whose essay at the front of the latest LRB arrived today. What's funny, if you can call it funny, is that I now longer suffer observations like his at a distance. The veil may have risen slowly, but I no longer look from a position of privilege at some strange world happening somewhere else. Last night both Julie and I celebrated (with considerable vigour) our own potential severance from institutions that have supported, or perhaps 'been' our lives for in my case 27 years, in hers a little less. Why? Because the situations we thought we worked in have transformed in that decade in to those we absolutely do not want to work in; because not only instead of presidents do we have fake businessmen, but instead of vice chancellors of universities, we have fake businessmen.
The digital world is probably killing knowledge itself, because knowledge might kill your ability to make money, or operate 'successfully' as a pariah in the late capitalist world. This is the new dark Ages; this is fucking terrible; this is the assassination of the intelligent in the name of 'business'. This is the end of the enlightenment, the end of reason, the end of virtue. So this really is the end of times; this is no joke.
I sat in a hot room yesterday being quizzed as part of course validation. The conversation, such as it was, was almost totally orientated around issues of branding and box ticking; on our place in the market and our mission for the future and the level of our conformity to 'standards'. Now if I were selling cars, I might say my Jaguars were 'sporty saloons', I might understand the mystique of 'British quality' that gives them 'value' (even if the company is owned by Tata). It's harder to do this with people; I would hate to 'define' my student body other than to compliment its individuality.
Meanwhile, we used to have a rather valid place in the market, that is before they decided to put it on the market! Then, suddenly, we couldn't fit in; we could only become the Bash Street Kids at the bottom of the table, our maverick status was inconceivable within hands-on management devoted to hands-on management. To be the Bash Street Kids of architecture was unacceptable no matter how appealing it might sound to the marketplace! Draw your own conclusions there.
So we have to conform. It's a form of tyranny. It is also the means by which we will fail, for others to gobble up the spoils. But I reckon the more universities act like corporations, the more they cease to be universities.
And as for that 'mission' for the future, I have long revered Keith Richards remark: 'to keep breathing'. (Plus, of course, to keep doing what he loves doing, and no matter what he endured with junk, I give a nod to the no doubt highly dubiuous aristos who kept him alive.)
So I sat in that room amidst a quagmire of fake status (rather than honest qualities) and I sank. I was disgusted.